Let’s Celebrate Business Integrity When We See It

A friend-of-a-friend of mine runs a mid-sized construction company in Latin America. As many readers will know, that industry in that region has a reputation for a relatively high degree of corruption, and in particular bribery.

This friend-of-a-friend says he absolutely refuses to give bribes, in spite of the obvious temptations. When asked whether he loses business because of it, he is candid. “Yes, of course.” And when asked whether he still does lots of business, and still makes a good living, he is again candid: “Yes, for sure!”

When was the last time someone told you a story like that?

We don’t often enough tell stories of integrity when we talk about business ethics. As a professor, I know I’m guilty of this. What cases get discussed in a typical business ethics class? You know the list well. Enron. Volkswagen. Wells Fargo. Equifax. Walmart. Spend 12 weeks discussing companies like those and you could be forgiven for thinking that the world of business is a rotten place. For a student, that may mean graduating and heading off into a career armed with a particular preconception about what kinds of behaviours are normal in business, namely rotten ones.

But I’m convinced that good behaviour, by people of high integrity, goes on all the time in business.

This week’s case in point: a pharmacist in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, has decided to stop selling homeopathic remedies. Why? Because he looked at the available evidence (he’s got the relevant scientific training) and realized that there’s no good evidence that homeopathic remedies actually work.

And as a business owner, and as a professional, he decided he simply couldn’t continue to sell those products.
(I’ve explained in a peer-reviewed paper why selling unproven health products is unethical. See: Alternative Medicine and the Ethics of Commerce.)

Feel free to disagree with me (and this pharmacist, and the entire scientific community) about the effectiveness of homeopathy. Feel free to swear that it works for you. My grandmother swore by the power of 4-leaf clovers. Others swear they’ve seen a psychic bend a spoon with his mind, or seen a magician saw a woman in half. The point is that this pharmacist has the training to evaluate evidence, and determined that—by the scientific standards his profession cleaves to—the evidence for homeopathy just isn’t there. Such a realization puts any qualified health professional who also happens to run a business in a sticky position. Do you sell something just because people will buy it? This one pharmacist’s answer, apparently, is “no.” It’s worth noting that the answer of most large pharmacy chains is “yes.”

But back to my main point: we need to celebrate integrity when we see it. It’s out there. It may be more common than its absence, it’s just that bad behaviour gets all the press. That’s a shame, and we should all do our part to nudge things in the opposite direction once in a while. The public’s perception of the world of business would benefit from it. And my impressionable students — soon to be your youngest employees — will be shaped by it.